Rational, Responsible and Reasonable Ethics

 Wouldn’t it be nice if every decision we made was rational, responsible and reasonable?  Of course it would. The problem is that figuring out what the rational, responsible and reasonable thing to do isn’t always easy. And despite our good intentions, getting a group to agree on the best course of action is even harder to accomplish. 

The challenge is how to integrate your ethics into your decision making in a way that helps you make better decisions that will reflect your values and allow you to be the sort of ethical, compassionate and responsible leader you’ve always wanted to be without getting into arguments with others.

Step 1: Create a list of ethics you value most. You can get this list from your faith tradition or from the 10 Humanist Commitments. https://americanhumanistcenterforeducation.org/?page_id=19369

Note:  Most people regardless of backgrounds - value the same things. Just understand that in a secular workplace - you must focus on the shared common human values and not on personal religious values like - obedience to God.  Focus on the common public values and not on your personal religious specific values. The religious reasons why you value these things is a personal matter - that you value them - is a public matter as it tells others what to expect from you.

Step 2: Sort the values based on what you think is most important.  Think of this as creating a priority list on how to break ties when more than one value is in conflict with another value. Which ones win out?  Studies on global ethics find compassion is highly rated - as is personal responsibility and honesty for instance. The point is to understand which you think is most important. 

Step 3: Start actively talking about - what good outcomes are - based on your chosen public values.  Is this solution compassionate? Responsible? Honest? How can you maximize the good that comes out of a decision and minimize the harm?  This is the actual practice of using your values explicitly in your decision making. 

Step 4: The final step is to make sure- you are making your decisions based on - accurate information.  This requires humility - which is hopefully - one of your values.   If you make decisions based on bad information - your decisions will be bad - not good. To make sure your decisions are good - you have to make sure you have good accurate information - which means - accepting that what you think you know - may not be so. And being willing to correct yourself when you make a mistake.  Learning how to determine what is true and what isn't - is an important life skill.

Want to learn more:

I have online courses that will teach you how to do this better. The first is:

Reality Based Decision Making For Effective Strategy Development - https://humanistlearning.com/realitybaseddecisionmaking/

Or consider taking one of my certificate courses in Applied Humanistic Leadership - https://humanistlearning.com/category/businesscourses/professionaldevelopment/certificateprograms/

A Behavioral Approach to Humanistic Management

How to improve productivity while reducing negativity through the strategic application of science and compassion.

 

Management training that ALSO teaches how to stop bullying

For me - the how do you get the behavior you want out of your team skill set - is the same skill set as knowing how to get unwanted behavior from your team to stop. This just happens to be the same skill set you use to stop unwanted behavior or obnoxious behavior like bullying/harassment.

Knowing how to shut down bad behavior quickly and compassionately is an essential management skill just as much as how you reinforce and encourage the good behavior you want. 

Learning how to motivate and reinforce people by creating compassionate but compelling conditions to reinforce the behaviors you want is a powerful skill set to have. I consider this a basic life skill. Well - not basic - definitely advanced - but certainly people who know how to do this ethically and compassionately are way more effective managers than people who do it through abuse.

Management training that focuses on how to reinforce and reward the behaviors you want while eliminating the behaviors you don't - for effective management - is a step in the right direction. 

A "how to improve productivity while reducing negativity" management course would include the following information: 

1. The ideal
2. The reality
3. How behaviors are reinforced
4. How behaviors are eliminated
5. Being strategic about your interpersonal interactions (the role of compassion)
6. How to encourage positive interpersonal dynamics in the workplace
7. What to do when someone isn’t playing fair or being nice
8. Respectful Problem Solving
9. Resolving Conflicts – is it a conflict? Or something else?
10. Putting it all together

And that's exactly what you will find in my Applied Humanistic Leadership Certificate Program: https://humanistlearning.com/certificate-in-applied-humanistic-leadership/ 

And my Certified Humanistic Leadership Professional Program: https://humanistlearning.com/certified-humanistic-leadership-professional/

Nothing is inherently immoral

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it. Jean Anouilh

Humanist ethics are situational ethics. And this makes a lot of people nervous. But it shouldn’t.

Humans all value the same things – for the most part. We value justice, compassion, and responsibility for instance. Studies have shown that there is indeed a common set of widely held human values.

Where these values come from is a matter of debate, obviously. But to me, as a pragmatist, I’m less interested in why we have these values than on how we apply them.  This is why I’m an advocate of situational ethics.

The reality we all face is that while we share common human values, those values are often in conflict with one another. Also, as individuals, given our personal experiences and beliefs, we may value some values higher then we value others.  We are constantly weighing our values to come to what we think are ethical decisions. Even if we don’t realize we do this – we are.

All situational ethics is, is an explicit acknowledgement of the reality of how we humans go about making moral decisions. The reason we do this is so that we can more effectively balance our moral values when making decisions.  We do this because it seems to yield better more moral decisions as judged by the real world effects of our decisions. We do less harm inadvertently when  we take such an explicit approach BECAUSE we considered the possibility that we might do harm while trying to do good.

Let that sink in for a moment. We might do harm while trying to do good. It doesn’t matter what your morality is or how it is based. If you aren’t willing to consider this possibility that you might accidentally do harm while trying to do good and you aren’t willing to think through how you might do the most good with the least harm, then you aren’t doing moral reasoning right.

I started this essay by saying nothing is inherently moral. But that doesn’t mean that anything goes. It just means you have to THINK through the potential consequences of your actions before taking action to insure your decisions are good and moral and will do the most good and least harm.

And this brings us back to the topic of leadership. Want to be a good moral and just leader?  Take the time to think through your actions to ensure you actually do good because good intentions aren’t enough. They never are.  Moral reasoning is hard. Put some effort into it.

Learn more about how to make more moral decisions with Planning for Personal Success – online course - https://humanistlearning.com/planforpersonalsuccess/